21 September 2012

17 September 2012

The Inquisition is alive and well today in Spain sorry, Saudi Arabia and targets women:

"“Women living under Saudi rule must wear the abaya, or total body
cloak, and niqab, the face veil; they have limited opportunities for
schooling and careers; they are prohibited from driving vehicles; are
banned from social contact with men not relatives, and all personal
activity must be supervised including opening bank accounts, by a male
family member or "guardian." These Wahhabi rules are enforced by a
mutawiyin, or morals militia, also known as "the religious police,"
officially designated the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) who patrol Saudi cities, armed with
leather-covered sticks which they freely used against those they
considered wayward. They raid homes looking for alcohol and drugs, and
harassed non-Wahhabi Muslims as well as believers in other faiths.” "

It’s widely reported that the obscenely opulent and
morally-perhaps-not-entirely-of- the-highest-standards Saudi Royal
Family made a Faustian deal with Wahhabite leaders. The deal supposedly,
was that the Wahhabists are free to export their fanatical brand of
Islam around to the Islamic populations of the world in return for
agreeing to leave the Saudi Royals alone. There are, however, other dark and dirty spoons stirring the Wahhabite-Salafist Saudi stew.

Little known is the fact that the present form of aggressive Saudi
Wahhabism, in reality a kind of fusion between imported jihadi Salafists
from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the fundamentalist Saudi
Wahhabites. Leading Salafist members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
were introduced into the Saudi Kingdom in the 1950’s by the CIA in a
complex series of events, when Nasser cracked down on the Muslim
Brotherhood following an assassination attempt. By the 1960’s an influx
of Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia fleeing
Nasserite repression, had filled many of the leading teaching posts in
Saudi religious schools. One student there was a young well-to-do Saudi,
Osama bin Laden

During the Third Reich, Hitler Germany had supported the Muslim
Brotherhood as a weapon against the British in Egypt and elsewhere in
the Middle East. Marc Erikson describes the Nazi roots of the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood thus:

…as Italian and German fascism sought greater stakes in the Middle
East in the 1930s and ’40s to counter British and French controlling
power, close collaboration between fascist agents and Islamist leaders
ensued. During the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of
German military intelligence, sent agents and money to support the
Palestine uprising against the British, as did Muslim Brotherhood
founder and "supreme guide" Hassan al-Banna. A key individual in the
fascist-Islamist nexus and go-between for the Nazis and al-Banna became
the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini.
After the defeat of Germany, British Intelligence moved in to take
over control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ultimately, for financial and
other reasons, the British decided to hand their assets within the
Muslim Brotherhood over to their CIA colleagues in the 1950s.

According to former US Justice Department Nazi researcher John Loftus, “during
the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to
Saudi Arabia. Now, when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the
leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood, like Dr Abdullah Azzam, became
the teachers in the madrassas, the religious schools. And there they
combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabism."

"Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not,” Loftus continues. “They
think that Islam—the Saudi version of Islam—is typical, but it’s not.
The Wahhabi cult has been condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by
the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot
of silence. This is a very harsh cult. Wahhabism was only practised by
the Taliban and in Saudi Arabia—that’s how extreme it is. It really has
nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant
religion. It always had good relationships with the Jews for the first
thousand years of its existence."

26 May 2012

A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.
This documentary is about the foreign policy of the United States. It demonstrates the importance of the political economy, the Mafia principle, propaganda, ideology, violence and force.
It documents and explains how the policy is based on the interest of major corporations and a tiny elite to increase profits and the United States governments own interests in maintaining and expanding it’s imperialistic influence.
Inside the United States this has been made possible with a propaganda of fear for the horrible enemies like the Soviet Union, Communists and so on and a love for “free markets”, “democracy”, “freedom” and so on.
Externally (and increasingly internally) this has caused massive poverty and suffering, genocide, war, coups, crushed unions and popular movements and environmental destruction.

02 January 2012

Many people have been wondering why you have such a bee in your bonnet about the Lancet Iraq Mortality Studies. I don't. Its pretty obvious to me. Your own conflict of interest and that of colleagues such as Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks is patently obvious.

In previous research papers such as "Universal patterns underlying ongoing wars and terrorism", calculations and conclusions were made, based on data for civilian killings provided by: IBC! You are also intimately connected to CERAC (as is Dr. Hicks), whose own CERAC Integrated Iraq Dataset (CIID) "builds on the event description from three datasets that monitor violence in Iraq: Iraq Body Count , iCasualties and ITERATE." Further, the Dept. of Economics at the Royal Holloway, University of London, also uses IBC in its country specific datasets.

Let's be clear, using figures from an organization that itself admitted were an undercount of victims ("Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media") and then deleting figures from that undercount, as you did for example in the above mentioned paper, can only mean that the conclusions reached in these papers and indeed any other that used the IBC figures, have been seriously compromised, especially considering the numbers reported in the 2 Lancet studies. And this explains your mania with Lancet.

Apart from the conflict of interest, which you fail to mention in any of your work, you also have a strange tendency to attack any critics of the Colombian government of Uribe, connected in his early days in Medellín to the cocaine cartels, and recently to all sorts of human rights abuses. I wonder if the fact that some of your funding has come from Colombia's central bank: Banco de la República has anything to do with this, or is it simply an ideological thing?

In 2007 you took it upon yourself to attempt to discredit AI & HRW's reports on Colombia in your paper The Work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Evidence from Colombia. This work and your attempts to discredit these 2 NGOs is characterised by a clear attempt to reduce the figures of victims as well as attempting to muddy the waters regarding state complicity with the paramilitaries in the human rights atrocities in Colombia. This is comparable to the work of Holocaust deniers who look to reduce at all costs, the number of Jews killed in that horrific crime. As you yourself acknowledge "The free flow of accurate information on patterns of violence can make a critical contribution to conflict resolution. Yet warring parties tend to compete to distort the relevant information in their favor." One can see which warring party you are working for...

In "The Colombian Conflict: Uribe's First 17 Months (J. Restrepo and M. Spagat), CEPR Discussion Paper 4570, 2004" you stated: "paramilitary groups...neither belong to the institutional apparatus nor are under the command and control of the state" That has now been shown to have ignored the reality that there has been tight collaboration between both. Both AI & HRW challenged these suppositions and still do as their reply to your paper shows: "Recent revelations about the degree of paramilitary infiltration in various state institutions, including the security forces, the legislature, and the DAS appear only to have confirmed what AI and other NGOs have been saying publicly for years. In many cases, AI has found it difficult to separate security force from paramilitary responsibility in killings, since there is evidence of the involvement of both. In fact, in many cases in which the article might describe the evidence for collusion as being "soft", subsequent research and/or judicial investigations have corroborated AI’s initial claims."

As both HRW and AI reports challenged many of your basic assumptions, they too had to be discredited. However, as your work is based on false assumptions and inaccurate staistics, it is actually your work that should be discredited.

A documentary adaptation Naomi Klein's 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine. An investigation of disaster capitalism, based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism -- the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock -- did not begin with September 11, 2001.

The film traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.

New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, shock and awe warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

This documentary is trying to point out that despite the development of our civilization in this the 21st century, our genetic legacy is still there and the primate we used to be remains in us and determines our lives much more than we suspect.

The human being is not as smart as he thinks and has simply become a SELFISH APE.

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About Me

"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. "

-- John Stuart Mill

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." -